


On the Underside Looking Up

by fabricdragon



Series: Smooth Criminal [9]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond - All Media Types, Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Background Relationships, Betrayal, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Hope, Hurt, M/M, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past, Sociopathic Tendancies, Trust, mentions of past relationships - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-16
Updated: 2017-03-16
Packaged: 2018-10-06 03:10:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10324235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabricdragon/pseuds/fabricdragon
Summary: a bit of Bond... perspectives and  thoughts about Vesper Lynd, Alec, M, Q, and Jim MoriartyMostly Vesper





	

Vesper Lynd was dead. He’d loved her–he’d even thought of quitting, retiring, for her–and she was dead.

What would come out later was that she had been blackmailed: lured into a love affair, and her lover kidnapped–forced into a life as a double agent by Yusef, like so many other women with good connections and soft hearts.

Records showed that she had drowned–the direct result of enemy action, and her own choices–that Bond had tried to save her. He’d eventually found Yusef, sent him to MI6, where he’d died under interrogation. He’d been seducing another woman, and, while her clearance was now questionable, she hadn’t given anything up.

It was a beautiful plan: find women with connections, stellar backgrounds, and soft hearts. It was far subtler and better than a typical honeytrap, because their loved ones never asked them to betray anything, never asked, never tried… perfect.

Bond got a medal, and a commendation, and if he was harder, and colder, and cruel afterwards? No one could blame him. She’d been his one true love, hadn’t she? Even committed suicide at the end, trying to keep him safe.

He threw himself into work and was better than ever. He was more lethal, more ruthless, even better at seduction–the perfect deadly weapon. And he knew that the psych team, and the doctors, and perhaps even M, expected him to die that year–but he didn’t.

They expected him to recover–develop feelings and weaknesses again. They expected him to falter–to have the numbness fall away and leave him falling into the dark. A few–perhaps more astute than most–wondered if they would have to kill him one day, when he started killing people he wasn’t supposed to kill; it came close sometimes. He’d lost most of his concern for other people.

When Alec betrayed him–betrayed England–he’d killed him.

But he hadn’t kept killing: he hadn’t come back to MI6 and snapped the neck of the psychologist who tried to talk to him; he hadn’t stared at them with the blank stare that so many agents had when they’d finally done too much, seen too much.

He would talk about Alec every now and then: fondly, a bit sadly, like an old relationship that had gone bad, but was old enough to not wound him anymore. It unnerved people sometimes, the way he would casually mention OO6, and how much Alec would have liked to have seen that, or been there, or how much he would have enjoyed that mission. People would look aside, and wonder, and worry about it–but if anyone new asked, “Oh? Where’s he now?” he would answer calmly that he was dead. He said it sadly but not with grief, just like he missed him. Few people in MI6 would ask how a Double-O died–you didn’t ask that–but, every now and then, someone did, and usually there would be a flicker of sadness in his eyes as he said, “I had to kill him.” And there would be a nervous laugh, as the person looked around to see who would let him in on the joke–except it wasn’t. Sometimes, rarely, in a different mood, he would just look hard for a moment and say, “He turned traitor.” And no one would ask after that.

 

He never mentioned Vesper–not after he’d filed his reports.

Ever.

Even in reports, you could only mention her name carefully, and only if he was in a very businesslike mood, and, even then, people quickly learned it wasn’t wise, because his eyes got an edge to them that they found unsettling. If people eventually decided that she had damaged his trust, broken it to the point of no return, they weren’t wrong.

Vesper had obliterated trust.

But they were wrong, all of them, about so much.

Slowly, even after Alec, he had gone back to his older habits. He flirted outrageously with anything female, perhaps more than he had before, and took them up on it less. Those that knew he spent time with men outside of work noted that he was doing so again: no more, and no less. On a mission, he did have a higher amount of collateral damage–and perhaps a touch too much enjoyment of explosions–but he was their best, and that sort of thing gets forgiven. He went to medical less, and the psych teams began avoiding him, because he always passed, but they always thought something was a bit off.

One of them told that to M, once, and M just looked at them and asked, “Are there any Double-Os who aren’t?” And really, what could you say?

M called him in, after Alec. She took him into the showers, which would have shocked some people, and looked at him, standing naked in the spray of water across from her, and said, “The psychologists think we’re going to have to shoot you, Bond. If anyone is going to shoot you, then I would expect it would be me–like you having to kill Alec. Am I going to have to shoot you, Bond?”

“Not unless you betray me, too,” he’d said, looking at her thoughtfully. “In which case, I suspect you’d have the sense to take me out first.”

“I would hope so, Bond,” she said, stepping out of the showers and drying her hair. “You were always our best.” She looked at him and smiled, sharply. “I never liked Vesper.” She nodded at him and went back to work.

He smiled–for the first time in a long time, without an ulterior motive–and shook his head. He could never fool her.

Because the story about Vesper was right, but it was wrong.

Yusef preyed on women with impeccable backgrounds and soft hearts, turning them into weapons, but Vesper hadn’t been one of them. Vesper was Yusef’s cousin–cold, cruel, and able to find a way into Bond’s heart and set a hook, while pretending to be a victim, to be kidnapped, to be blackmailed. He’d listened to Vesper change, once he was supposedly unconscious, telling people that they should let him live, because she could control him, use him. She’d set it up for him to rescue her, and he’d felt that hook in his heart pull, and tear, and he stood there and watched as she realized he wasn’t moving.

She’d escaped the death trap, came to him softly, trying to beg him to understand.

He’d smiled at her then, and told her, “I had loved you. I was going to quit for you, but that would never have worked, would it? Because you didn’t love me–you loved having a Double-O on your line.”

She protested, and he held her head under water until she confessed: the entire story, of what Yusef did, and what she did, and she claimed that she loved him anyway, but of course she couldn’t quit–they would kill her, or worse.

And he nodded, and held her in his arms, put just enough pressure on her throat to send her to sleep, and drowned her and what was left of his trust. He sent Yusef to MI6 knowing that her secret would die with him: he was allergic to interrogation chemicals.

 When Alec betrayed him–but not HIM: England–he’d wanted Bond to go away, or come with him, and he’d clearly gone more than a bit mad; Bond’s main thought had been sadness that he hadn’t seen it in time. He blamed Vesper.

And he watched M–yes, even M–for a long time, to see if she would turn on him too. She never did. She would sacrifice him on the altar of a mission if she had to, but she’d always been like that, and it was comforting to know she hadn’t changed.

But Bond did.

The change in Bond was so gradual he hadn’t noticed it, when slowly something like affection started creeping back in, like fog. It was the sarcastic voice in his ear on missions, the exasperated moans about equipment. Q was steady–and, really, he could have betrayed Bond at any time, couldn’t he? Bond had just begun to try to remember what it was like, to not pretend to care, when a shock to his system in the form of a dark haired man with an Irish lilt had shown up in his life.

A man who made no pretense of caring, or at least whose caring didn’t even imply trust.

A man who wanted him, desired him, but thought death was worth more than sex.

Bond looked at Jim’s dark eyes and he saw the same wounds, the same betrayal, the same refusal to care, or trust, that he knew like he knew his own heartbeat. He wondered then which of them would die, or if both of them would, and if it would be worth it.

And then Jim took Q, but he saved him.

And some small piece of hope that had survived Vesper flickered, and it was a breath between burning back to life and going out forever. He felt it in Jim, too: like a smoldering ember, forgotten, slowly igniting beneath the leaves.

It was painful, like a limb prickling back to life, and his hands itched to hold someone down under the water, or pull them up… and he wasn’t sure which he wanted, and he wasn’t sure what side of the water he was on.

 


End file.
